Protective jacketing for transmission cables is well known in the art. For many years, the cable industry has relied on the jacketing developed for use with telephone cables. The existing types of protective cable jackets include those made from steel armor and rubberized jacketing materials. Steel armored cables provide good resistance against crushing, penetration by rodents, as well as improved corrosion resistance and good low frequency shielding. Unfortunately, steel armored cables are very expensive to manufacture since they require additional fabrication steps, and are therefore somewhat over engineered for use in cable television systems. For example, many cable TV cables require crush and corrosion resistance but rarely need rodent protection or low frequency shielding.
Conventional coaxial cables, while providing good corrosion protection as well as being lightweight and having a small bend radius, are burdened by the disadvantages of poor cut-through resistance, low impact resistance and little or no crush or deformation resistance. Armored cables are additionally burdened by large bend radius and an inherent stiffness that makes the cable quite awkward to handle. Moreoever, an armored jacket is much more difficult to remove for interconnection of the cable than is the elastomeric/plastic (e.g., polyolefin) jacket of a conventional coaxial cable.
It would be advantageous to provide a new protective cable jacket construction specifically adapted to the needs of cable TV and similar industries. Such an improved cable jacket construction should exhibit improved crush and high impact resistance while being inexpensive, easy to handle, and inexpensive to deploy. The present invention provides such a cable jacket.